Excruciating Guitar Voyage, does the game live up to its name? Read on to find out.
Metal music has been banned by a tyrant king, anyone found listening to it will be sent off for reprogramming. A resistance group called Roxxor2 has been created and you must find them. You play the character named PX who must find Craig, who has been taken for reprogramming.
Excruciating Guitar Voyage is a platform based adventure game. The game is played like a platform game and you can interact with objects and people like in an adventure game. Along your journey you come across obstacles such as the first puzzle of getting across a closed bridge. You must electrocute yourself and then touch a power supply to activate the bridge which will extend the walkway. Other puzzles include setting fire to objects in order to pass them and finding food for a large insect. The puzzles are not overly hard to work out, you are occasionally shown a visual hint to help on the trickier ones.
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Items can be picked up and used on objects or given to people, similar to the point and click adventure games such as Monkey Island. There are also platform related challenges such as avoiding a series of laser beams while breaking into a base. These are less fun due to the very floaty jumping system where your character will seemingly take forever to fall back to earth.
Most of your time will be spent interacting with the vast number of characters in the game. Excruciating Guitar Voyage is fully voice acted and the scenes can drag on a little, you can only skip the text and speech after listening to them fully for the first time. The voice acting is mixed, there is some good acting amidst the very bad, and this is the reason why you will want to skip most of it. The crazy Taco guy was kinda fun and even had a short song to sing but overall the acting felt very flat and at times quite offensive. Along your journey you meet a janitor who accuses you of being gay and using terms such as ‘shirt lifter’.
Graphically the game is fairly poor. The characters have hand drawn bodies with a photo of their face bolted on. The scenery is a simple texture based design which looks quite plain. There are some issues with the scrolling, it can be very jerky when moving even in small areas. At one point I found it very annoying during a puzzle where you had to press switches in a certain order to light up a pentagram, despite moving in a very small area the jerky scrolling was bad which lead to confusing puzzle solving.
My voyage was cut short after around 45 minutes into the game. Upon completing a puzzle (fitting a handle on a sprinkler) the game crashed and booted me back to the dashboard. It started me back at the beginning of the chapter which took around 20 minutes to get back to the point before it crashed. The game crashed in the same place so I decided to call it a day.
Excruciating Guitar Voyage costs 240 :MSPoints: which is quite an expensive trip for the quality of the game. I can’t recommend purchasing due to the poor graphics, voice acting and the potential game breaking bugs found in the game. There are some good ideas but the game unfortunately lives up to its name of being excruciating.
You can download the trial or purchase the full version from the Xbox Marketplace.
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